A biblical-era Israeli shrine shows signs of the earliest ritual use of marijuana
A limestone altar from an Iron Age shrine in Israel contains remnants of the world’s earliest known instance of burning cannabis plants in a ritual ceremony, a new study finds. This altar, along with a second altar on which frankincense was burned, stood at the entrance to a room where religious rites were presumably held inside a fortress of the biblical kingdom of Judah. Previous analyses of recovered pottery and documented historical events at the site indicate that the shrine was used from roughly 760 B.C. to 715 B.C. Excavations at Israel’s Tel Arad site in the 1960s uncovered the shrine amid the ruins of two fortress cities, one built atop the other, that date from the ninth century B.C. to the early sixth century B.C. Arad, about 45 kilometers west of the Dead Sea, guarded Judah’s southern border. Chemical analyses of dark material on the two altars’ upper surfaces conducted in the late 1960s proved inconclusive. Using modern laboratory devices, a team led by archaeologist Eran Arie...